• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 888 0

through the hallways, leisurely, abstracted, picking up a thought here or an emotion there and looking it over to see whether it seemed threatening or merely amusing. If it amused her, you would drag yourself away, sweating and feeling as if you wanted a bath, counting yourself lucky that she hadn’t seen the idea or feeling as a threat to the ship. When she perceived those, you wound up in the Agony Booth, while Troi let the pain break down the mind’s barriers and spent hours, with a dreadful professional detachment, going through every thought in a brain, looking for the one weak spot that represented the tendency toward weakness or betrayal. Once it was found, there was no question of mercy anymore. People who might fail the Enterprise, or worse, were found in the act of failing her, never came out of the Booth—and the horror of their screams was much worse than the usual cries of pain. The counselor specialized in making sure the maximum punishment was extracted from the condemned before they were allowed to die. And to those who had had even light brushes with it, the thought of that calm, amused regard sitting in your mind, watching while you died—even that last privacy denied you—was the greatest terror of all.

So when La Forge looked at the counselor as if Death were sitting there on his bed, demure and calm, he felt that he could be pardoned for the reaction. It was wisest to be safe, after all. But the counselor seemed to have other things on her mind at the moment. There were stories about this, too, that made the rounds of the crew. There were times when Betazeds apparently became more than usually … interested in the sensual side of life, and the whispered scuttlebutt said that the counselor had ways of making the experience more than usually … interesting for the other person involved: a flip side, as it were, to the ability to brush aside the boundaries of someone’s mind like a curtain. Pleasures redoubled and reflected almost beyond bearing for their intensity, that was what the rumors said … what rumors there were. The counselor’s lovers tended to be tight-lipped, if only because she could become murderous if she felt a confidence might have been betrayed. La Forge had never dreamed that he might find himself in this situation. But now, looking at her, he smiled, determined to make the best of it. The counselor could make a powerful friend; even the captain had to give way to her under certain circumstances. Her patronage could mean early advancement, privileges … and the obvious pleasures.

“Come sit down,” the counselor said, patting the bed beside her. La Forge came toward her slowly, his grin broadening, taking his time. He knew he looked good; he didn’t mind making her aware of the fact … and feeling the fear die away, feeling the desire come up, was enjoyable, too. He sat and decided to dare to be a little aggressive about it—she was rumored to like that, from Riker at least.

“Well,” he said, “this is a nice surprise,” and he slid his arms around her, grinning still. Her great dark eyes widened a little; she smiled, too, slipping her arms around him, holding him quite tightly.

“Yes,” she murmured, “it is, isn’t it?” Behind his neck, something hissed—and that was all he heard.

Troi disentangled herself from the unconscious form of La Forge and let him down gently on the bed. She looked over to the side of the room, the spot out of sight by the closet, and Geordi came out and smiled grimly at the sight of “himself.”

“Glad we were able to tap in!comms enough to catch him going off shift,” Geordi said. He put his hands under the man’s armpits and pulled him off the bed, half-dragging him over to an open access panel in the wall. “Didn’t take long to get the message, did he?”

“No question of that,” Troi said, standing up and rubbing her hands together. She caught herself at it, analyzed it as a sudden urge to get clean of trickery and of the m`elange of emotions she had sensed in him—that dreadful fear, coupled with desire that lay so close to the surface—the two potentiating each other. A lot of these